I'm not sure because I stay as far away from MACs as I can, but there was someone looking into one of those Windows emulators to run on a MAC (Why is it that they don't bother developing a MAC emulator for Windows?)

The Kindle performas well in Word environments, and Open Office (Available for MAC) will produce "Word like" .docs

I think Kindle gen (available from the DTP -- I'll hunt a link) definitely works, but there aren't many that swear by it!

I'm not sure about Calibre and it suffers the same love/hate enthusiasm.

the author uses Mac and used a conversion service to make book into "kindle" AND to actually publish it - as you can see some native formatting is over-riding the kindle indent and line space between paras.

could we fix this for him?

yes it was so simple, open dat file in OO and export as pdf and process via Preview html download.

then in Notepad do a bulk replace of all the unwanted widows and orphans etc crap tagged to all the Ps and bingo, pure kindle in 5 minutes.

we then tried the zip-zip and yes it looked great on KFC and kindle itself.

sent the zip file to bloke free of charge as could not ask $39.95 for 5 minutes work, but he had a fixation on not publishing himself and a firm belief his "service provider" was not allowed to put up a revised version without losing his "rankings".

hence it is still the same, BUT point is that yes it is very simple to make a dat file into proper kindle or "almost kindle".

in fact looks like amazon itself is just as disenchanted with windows type WYSIWYG Word post 1995 that The Guide itself was done in Mac Word and printed to pdf, albeit the toc is not clickable for whatever reason??

I'm one of those who does like calibre. http://calibre-ebook.com/ If you save your Word document as a filtered HTML web page (html) you can use that as the input document to calibre and mobi as the output.

However I also have Parallels installed on the Mac and have Mobipocket on that.

Good news for Mac users! I don't think you have to use MobiPocket at all. You can probably do it all in Microsoft Windows.

That's what I did with our first book and it seems to be working just fine.

You can insert your cover image and bookmarks for the beginning (where the Kindle jumps to when a reader first opens it) and for the table of contents, as well as create your table of contents, all within Word.

Then upload it via your Dashboard. No need to use Calibre, HTML, or MobiPocket as far as I can tell.

Yo, read4awareness, you're going about this the hard way. You don't need MobiCreator or HTML. The two books below my signature were made with MSWord on the Mac. If you're using Apple's Pages, that's good enough too, just export the finished thing in DOC format, which is the same as MSW. I've described on the Formatting sister forum how I did it, but you don't even need my posts, just send your MSW document up to the AZW translator at yourname@free.kindle.com and see what it looks like when it comes back. (That's an exact copy of the produced book -- which the sample DTP gives you is most definitely not.)

If you insist on doing it the hard way, use Calibre (actually with a lower case initial).

The only problem is profing the final daft as it will look on a Kindle.

The dtp preview works but if you have a 200 'page' book, you are in for a loooooooong session as it is very slow.

If the author has a Kindle (which is probably the best all things considered) it is a simple matter of mailing either the Word.doc to the @free.kindle.com address or the HTML package that the DTP generates when you upload the book ( this is the best method).

If you don't have a Kindle you are:

1) Forced to use Kindle for (MAC) or the Downloadable Kindle previewer (this is closest to a real kindle).

2) You will not have direct access to a Kindle conversion and will need MobiPocket or Calibre, or Kindle gen.

Hey get a Kindle Life will be easier! even a busted one can be registered for the @free.kindle.com address!

Amazon bought Mobipocket in 2005 in order to access their technology. Mobipocket continue to trade as an online eBook store and provide eBook reader and creator software for free. Although the Amazon Kindle and Kindle books are based on Mobipocket software as far as I know Amazon say that Kindle Gen is their official book compiler. Kindle Gen is available for Mac and Windows and Linux.

I have found that Kindle Gen works perfectly well, but as far as most people are concerned, as a command line driven program, it just isn't very friendly. It also is not tolerant of incorrectly formed input.

I use Jutoh, an eBook editing program that outputs directly and transparently into Kindle Gen. Jutoh allows output into several eBook formats, including EPUB and Mobipocket/Kindle. If you build your book in EPUB format it applies the standard EPUB pre-flight checks and will locate and warn you of any serious flaws in your HTML. Once you have a clean EPUB version you can then output via the Kindle Gen compiler. Like Calibre, Jutoh lets you preview compiled book files. Calibre is free download but its a bit of Swiss Army knife with many functions. Jutoh is easier to use.

Jutoh is cross platform so you can run it on a Mac, a Windows PC or a Linux box. And its not expensive.

Calibre works on the Mac and is, in my opinion, a better program than Mobipocket Creator. It is a free download. Just Google Calibre and you will find it. Set the input file to ZIP and the output file to MOBI and Calibre does the rest. It also lets you include your cover, just like Mobipocket. One word of caution, though. It doesn't like corrupted files, so if your book ends up not looking as it should, the chances are that your file became mildly corrupted somewhere along the line. The only cure that I know of is to go back to your master document, save it as plain text (which will get rid of any corruptions that it has picked up as well as all the formatting) and then reformat it for your Kindle.